The fraction of engineers at Google to which these conditions apply is tiny. It's absolutely absurd to interview based on some fictitious need. The real reason Google interviews the way they do is not because they need a high bar. Their interviews are structured to preserve the egos of the interviewers and because, like the gaming industry, they can simply due to the sheer number of applicants.

Ego abounds everywhere. However, your point about applicant volume motivating the setting of a high bar for entry is spot on.

This is happening throughout the corporate world. Too many candidates for too few high-paying and elite positions.

My girlfriend works in finance and recently interviewed for a post-MBA position at (arguably) the top company for the work she does. She talked with other candidates, and discovered it was not uncommon to pay thousands of dollars on interview preparation (books, coaching sessions, etc.), and to spend, say, over 100 hours prepping in total... for interviews with a single firm... which you weren't even certain you'd be interviewing with. This trend is only accelerating.

The less pessimistic stance is to just say this is a consequence of greater specialization. The less optimistic stance is to say we are seeing professionalization for the sake of professionalization.

I'm not optimistic.

Google's requirements also allow easy mobility between teams. If all I knew was one framework, I'd always have to prove myself again when I move teams. The hiring bar ensures that most candidates can adapt due to their strong CS base.

No, these interview questions do not signal for that kind of adaptability. They're a signal that someone studied (crammed for a few weeks, often) a small slice of CS. They're a poor signal for the work engineers do there, or anywhere, in almost every case.

Please hire using frameworks knowledge for your company. More power to you.

"Their interviews are structured to preserve the egos of the interviewers "

You just stereotyped about 100k people. You have no idea about how many people work to make the interview questions as interviewee friendly as possible. You may hate the company but don't judge the people without knowing them.

I'd argue that someone with CS fundamentals doesn't necessarily tell me how adaptable someone is. Many times, the depth isn't there to strongly indicate one way or another. Adaptability is a difficult thing to try to assess.

I say this as someone working for another FAANG whose HQ is not too far away from Google's, and as someone who spent 4 years in a math PhD program.

But the best solution is just buy a library - at my first job (Hydrodynamics research) we didn't write our own FFT - we just brought one from NAG.

Google couldn't buy a page rank library unfortunately. Nor can they evolve search or develop tensorflow with people that just work off of libraries.

And what proportion of HN readers are in that situation ?

Not that where I worked wound not have built things from scratch - still whish I had had the budget to use ML for one project but with hard ware costs of £250,000 just for the hardware in early 80's it wasn't cost-effective.

And there in lies the problem. HN extrapolates its skill set to be the need of ALL companies. And companies should only test for that.

I do systems for a living. There is no way I would be successful if all I knew were frameworks.